InfoWorld's Peter Wayner reports on once niche programming languages gaining mind share among enterprise developers for their unique abilities to provide solutions to increasingly common problems. From Python to R to Erlang, each is being increasingly viewed as an essential tool for prototyping on the Web, hacking big data sets, providing quick predictive modeling, powering NoSQL experiments, and unlocking the massive parallelism of today's GPUs.

I forgot about the GUI comment.
When I started programming, few people had access to OO languages or even books about that thing.
All the GUIs available for the home user were programmed in procedural/imperative style, most of them in assembler.
And you did not need any "luck" for doing a GUI system. You had to be smart enough to abstract so much, but the same is true trying to do so in OO style.

These days I am remembering a little generic GUI thas was released for C64, (not GEOS) and probably took a few KB of ROM only. It was included in the Final Cartridge 3, a pirating tool for software "backup"